Interview with Mani Bhushan Founder of Taco Ocho

Business Brain the show for entrepreneurs episode 426 for Wednesday, February 22, 2023. Greetings folks and welcome back to Business Brain. We are the show where we take all aspects of our lives and filter them through our business brains to, to try and get the most value and the most efficiency out of everything. Because whether it's our actual business lives, our hobbies, our personal lives, there's always benefits to using our business brains. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And still out in California, I'm Shannon Jean. I'm excited about our show today. We've got a great interview. We hadn't done one in a while and this is just the type of business owner that I love talking with. Super authentic and I think there's going to be some great lessons today.

I agree. Yeah, it's, it's Mani Bouchon from Taco Ocho which is a small chain of restaurants that he created. It remains privately owned. It's his in the Dallas Fort Worth area or maybe the Dallas area, I don't know.

I don't know.

I didn't look at it on a map to see if it spreads that far out. Doesn't really matter. He's got a lot of lessons to share lately. You know, we've been doing two episodes a week. Much shorter episodes, the 15ish, 15 to maybe 20 minute episodes. This week we are breaking that form this interview. The meat of the interview ran almost 30 minutes and we thought, okay, we can chop this up into two pieces and deliver, you know, one to you today and one to you on Friday or we can just give you the whole thing and you can choose when to hit pause and when to hit resume. Now I know we all understand that intellectually and applying our business brains to this, that seems to make sense to me. However, if you folks would have rathered that we chop this up, let us know for the future feedbackusbrain show. We're happy to, you know, we want to deliver things in the way that you want. We've heard great feedback about the bite sized episodes and so, you know, I just, I, it's one thing like this interview so to spread it out across multiple episodes seemed counterintuitive to us.

Yeah, there wasn't a good reason to do it, so.

But maybe there is, maybe there's a reason that we don't see yet. And our business brain, our business brainiacs out there will, will inform us. But for now, let's go listen to Monty.

Moni, thank you so much for joining Us today, we're really excited to learn about you and your business, Taco Ocho.

Okay.

And so let's get started a little bit. I'm really fascinated by your long history working in the restaurant industry and then the transition that you made. So tell us a bit about Taka Ocho, how you got started back in 2011 and what the company looks like now.

Okay. Taka Ocho is a family owned business and we serve Latin food. Basically, we have gathered food from different Latin American countries and actually enhanced the flavors by being creative and inventive. And we try to serve that in the neighborhoods at affordable price points so that we give people awesome food which is healthy, we give gluten free options, vegan options, and everything is made from scratch. So that's what the contest is about. Now, how did I end up there? I worked for large companies all my life and I got fed up during the process because they were all trying to kind of assure that there is 20% growth in profit every year and serving more and more processed food. I said, no, I got to serve people something special, something. Something they really enjoy and healthy for them. So I decided, okay, I'll leave the corporate America. It's time for me to be unbridled and move on. Because I was always a maverick and creative, I said, it's time for me to go do something different. So I took four year vacation, basically drank a lot of wine, traveled a lot, cooked every day. Almost to the extent my wife put me on an action plan saying, don't make any more food, you're making me fat. So during that process, I really created some awesome food. And then I hired a sous chef from Four Seasons in Mexico City, wanted him to take my recipes and create sauces so that we can easily cook fresh food in the restaurants. Once that was done, having worked for big companies, I did taste panel studies on the food by inviting 31 people to make sure what stays and what goes. And then when I was ready, I launched the first store in 2011.

And was it an immediate success?

No, not at all. No. So I opened my first store in the middle of the recession. Even with all my experience, all the shopping centers don't want to give somebody who is brand new an opportunity to get a great location, which is different now. I can get what I want now, but so I had to settle for an empty shopping center with no one in the shopping center except me.

Wow.

Oh, man. So no anchor to bring people in and walk them past your store? Yeah, yeah, right.

So, I mean, it was a struggle. So. But we made it work. It took a lot of 80 hour weeks, but I made the concept work. But the location had some inherent problems, though. It did some daytime business, it did not do much night business. And I understood soon that when you're taking so much time and effort to create really good food with so many flavors, which is almost like spending 10 hours of prep every day to create the stuff, you can't make it work in an office environment. People are still going to consider you as a lunch play and you don't get credit for what you're doing. So, yeah, so subsequent to that, I started going to neighborhoods which have decent higher incomes and then started opening stores. And then that seemed to be the mantra.

That's great.

When.

When did you open the second location?

The second location opened in March of 2015. Okay.

And it looks like your third location opened not that long after that. Correct.

So the third location opened in October of 2015 and was a mistake because. So. So to train people to get the consistency because our food is a little bit more complicated. There's so many different sauces go. So many things we mix together to get flavors which can't be replicated very easily so that we have a unique selling proposition. So that makes it, on the other hand, very difficult to kind of scale it. That's the reason I never even considered franchising the concept, because once you franchise you to get the same quality and maintain it is not going to be so, so easy.

Got it. So despite. Despite this, what I'll call your efficiency of sauces at the beginning, that. That's not. That's not enough to just turn this into, say, a, you know, cookie cutter scenario.

No. Unless I make the sauces somewhere else. And then, you know, but we don't. We prepare in every store. We hand dice, hand cut, cook, drill everything in the store to make sure it is fresh and awesome.

Okay, so I misunderstood when you said that you hired a sous chef and figured out the recipes for the sauces, but you're not making them in a central location and delivering them.

Okay, right. I made the recipes. But to make something, like in fine dining, you make sauces and then you saute pan, cook. That way it is fresh. So I did not know how to make the sauces. Coming from fast food background, I knew how to make the recipe. He came and taught me how to make the sauces.

Got it. That makes. Okay, gotcha. Gotcha. Well, I mean, a valuable thing, but. But still doesn't. It doesn't scale like A franchise would need to scale or something. So. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. That makes sense.

Yeah. So.

So, Monty, after working with big companies for, you know, so long and 30, 40 years, you go out on your own. And was, was it similar to when you were working for somebody else, or were there things that surprised you about now that you were in the employer and, and you were making those decisions? Talk about the. That difference and how that mindset had to kind of change.

Transition is kind of, you know, you're prepared for it, but you're not. So in a big company, when you run an ad to hire employees, you get so many resumes. In a small company, nobody knows who you are, and you, you have trouble attracting talent. The whole thing about this business is having great food and great people. So the biggest challenge when you're small is attracting the people especially you don't have any family members working for you. So that was a big struggle. And then you have to do payroll yourself. You got to do marketing. You have to do pretty much everything yourself because you don't really have no gna, no staff. So in corporate, you could pick up the phone and there are people to help you. So you got to make your own ops manual. So new product launch, you're the guy who goes and makes the presentation and trains people in the other stores. So it's very complicated than in a large company. But at the same time, you don't sacrifice your creativity and you don't do things you don't believe in. And you get to do, you get to make decisions which are good for the customer. And then you're so close to customers. So there's a 99% probability that whatever you do will succeed.

Yeah, yeah. No, this is, Yeah, I think this is the part of the lesson that I think is super important for anyone starting a business that thinks, oh, you know, start business step one and then step two, profit. You know, it. There's we, we joke that overnight Success takes about 20 years. And, and, and that. That proves out to be true more often than not. Sometimes it's 10 years, sometimes it's five. It's rarely ever five days or even 20 days.

So, yeah, every now and then, somebody gets very lucky and it happens. Sure, sure. Yeah.

So, but, but even then, even in those scenarios, if you dig into it, they might have, you know, the venture you know about got lucky, but it usually doesn't come out of nothing. Right. There's usually been four failures before that that taught them plenty of lessons, that set them up for that, that you're right, very fortunate success. But yeah, yeah.

So the biggest challenge is you're a small business, nobody knows about you. You need about 20 to 30,000 customers for each store to hit about a million dollar sales based on ticket average and so on the frequency of the customers, the super frequent customer, the infrequent customer, so on. When you actually look at it, it takes you that many customers to acquire that many customers is not easy when you don't have market penetration. A city like Dallas Fort Worth has 8 million people. You need about 45 stores to get market exposure. With four stores, nobody knows who you are and it is so difficult to get traction. So that's where the biggest challenge is.

Yeah, that sounds like it. And I probably tougher to get economies of scale and, and that kind of thing with, with, you know, fewer. Fewer locations.

Right, right, totally. Yeah.

Yeah.

Have you thought about opening a store in a smaller area? You know, bigger fish, smaller pond or same size fish, smaller pond?

No, but I have tried different. Like for the store in Frisco is a very small store. It's full service, but it's still 1600 square feet.

Got it.

And then it's, it's doing close to a million dollars. So that's not a bad experiment. Yeah. So okay.

Yeah, that's terrific. One of the comments you made that I, that stuck with me here, that I want to go back to is you said when leaving the corporate world and then going out on your own, it got you much closer to the customer and was that I'm assuming by, you know, it sounds like an enjoyable thing, that that was something you enjoyed and it was rewarding for you. Right, right.

So what happens in a, in a big company, you want to launch a product, you have so many layers of people and everybody adds their own biases. Do it. So I don't want to say the names. Two companies come to my mind. One went back and invested a lot of money, changed the menu and then got a lot of great food, healthy food, for a concept which was built on serving, you know, food which is not healthy. So it was a major failure. Yeah, but all the testing and everything else said, oh yeah, it's great, we'll want to eat that. But in reality it never happened. So that concept lost lot, lot of business and then they had to go back to the other side and that's even distracted customers even more so by being. I lost only one product, one case study without talking to the customers and guess what? It failed.

Interesting. I'm pulling in two weeks yeah, that's, that's crazy. And okay, so your background, you're dash. You're from, from India, born in the United States. Born in India.

No, I was born in India.

Okay.

Came to hear pretty young, about 22 year old. I went to college here. Some went to college there. So started out in the restaurant. I mean, I was an account executive in India leading that agency. So. But when you come to a different country, you're going to school, you're not going to do the same exact thing. It's very difficult to break in. So I said, okay, let me go to restaurants. So I started there and I worked my way up. So I was a National Senior VP for two large companies running almost as many as 1800 units.

Wow, that's awesome. So how did you then come into to Latin food? Was it just your, what you enjoyed and you made things that you liked and you thought you share that with people or different?

No, no. One thing is my wife is a Mexican. Okay. But she's a bad cook. When she cooks, the pots and pans run away. Okay. So, so I work for Taco Bell, so I knew Mexican food. So I, I, I said to myself, but so when I went to Mexico to ask, you're supposed to go ask the hand of her, your daughter's hand. You guys supposed to go and ask the parents. So I went there and they served me food which was very different than what we eat in the U.S. what we call Mexican here. So I said, wait, this makes sense. So I started exploring and learning. So I traveled a lot, took her along so she can talk in Spanish. We went to small villages, talked to people, got to see so much of what we don't see. Then we went to Peru, went to different Latin American places, and I said, I got to bring flavors we're not used to and probably enhance them. To give you an example, in, in Ecuador, they used the meat and they put some chilies in it, and they call it Carne Colorado. We took that changed, we added beer to it and slow cooked it and then putting jicama slaw on it to give it a different flavor profile. And it's a great hit. So that every product we got, we played with something really authentic and then kind of gave it a little twist to make it not easily copyable so that we have a standalone concept.

I like that. That's great. That uniqueness of it and the traveling around of finding these, these dishes and flavors, and I think that's terrific. Okay, so you, you talked about staffing, and I Want to talk about. Because that seems like a constant challenge, especially right now. Because. Right. You know, we. Even if you don't own a service business, we've all been impacted by lack of staff availability and, you know, how do you deal with it?

I would call it. It's a nightmare. Okay. Even before COVID it was difficult to staff. After Covid, it was a nightmare. I'm having to work at my age in stores all the time and not trying to do strategic important things, but to help, you know, run the food and stuff like that. So it was very, very bad for a long time. Finally, we're getting some people. It's not the same quality.

Interesting.

I used to get great quality 10 years ago. You know, I mean, when I first opened the store in 2011, when I put an ad outside on the window, I would get 200 resumes. Right now I can't even get two. I spent about $500 every two weeks on. Indeed. Yeah. 15 people apply and maybe one may show up for the interview.

Wow.

What's your take on the. The.

I mean, I don't know what is going on. Maybe there are so many jobs available. They just get so many people call them, they take one and they don't even have courtesy to call you back. It's been very frustrating.

Yeah, I can. I can imagine. Have you tried to implement, you know, any kind of automation or things to make up for lack of staff or.

No, I haven't. I'm looking at it automating without sacrificing. So yeah, we have done minor things, but so, but I didn't want. So all the big companies have gone to kitchen miners. Basically, lettuce is shattered somewhere. Everything is diced somewhere. Meat is cooked. You put in a re. Thermalizer, make it hot. I didn't want to do that. The minute you do that, the whole charm of local good for you concept is not same. I'm lying to customers when I do that.

Yep, that makes sense. Yeah, that seems to be just such a challenging thing. A constant battle. Well, what happened? How did you. What did you do when the pandemic hit and everything got shut down? How did you adapt to that?

No, it's funny. So I was. I was reading in Restaurant News and I saw Panera has 31 digital sales. Then I said marketing, moving towards digital. Why can't we grow our business in digital?

Yeah.

So in 2019, having worked for big companies, even though I was so small company, I. I actually made strategic plans every year for what I got accomplished. So the stat Plan we made in 2019 was to acquire 30% in digital sales. With that we implemented, we had. We were one of the first people to go with DoorDash. And then we implemented online ordering systems and we went to Easy Catering and kind of approached them to kind of do the catering sales. And then we printed flyers and gave it to all the customers who came. And we prepared customers ahead of time, not even knowing there's going to be a pandemic.

Wow.

March 19th. Dining rooms got shut except for one store in Richardson, which is only business district. It was down 50%. But the other two stores which are open at that time had very little impact because our customers lot of food. And we made some very fast science and created curbside signs outside. But as far as the system to go and whatever, we had all the systems in place and it was very easy for us to transition.

Yeah, that's huge. Wow.

That's.

I mean, it's, it's, you know, that's, that's one of those things like we were talking about, like that was super fortunate for your business, but, you know, you had a decade or decades plus of big business experience that led you to like even just using the concept of a strategic plan and you happen to pick a good one, don't get me wrong. But it wasn't so far off the map. You picked it because it was going to help your business, you know, regardless of some unpredictable lockdown. So. Yeah, no, I think that's what a great lesson. Yeah. Always be growing. Yeah.

So when I saw all the young people migrating to more and more digital sales and I said no, to stay tuned to the younger people, I have to have a lot of digital offering. And that's why we changed.

Yeah, totally makes sense. And, and you know, kudos to you for keeping aware of that. And that's, that's terrific. So I, I don't know anything about the restaurant business. You talked a little bit about how you pick a location and different things and the, the, the. Are you looking at like demographic information or answers?

Yeah, yeah, right. We look at the demographic information. So household income, traffic generators, actual traffic flow in front of your store, the access to your store. I only go with NCAPs so that there is visibility now because of technology. I actually use the pink studies. So when I'm opening a new store, I look at where are the people coming from now. So the telephone pings will tell you which way people are coming from, whatever. So that way I know how far they're coming from. So. And I like to open stores without cannibalizing an existing store.

That's terrific. Yeah.

So when you say ping studies, you mean studies that actually follow people's cell phones. So you know where. Where they've been.

Right. So basically this company. This company, what it does is. Okay. They'll say, okay, you, you, you. They look at. At your store and your shopping center, and they look at, where did they originate from? Did they come from work? Did they come from school? And what. What do they do after they eat? Where are they going? So they capture that data and give you that data and you pay for that? Of course. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, of course. You pay. No, that's fine. Yes, but what a. What a fascinating. That's so smart. I mean, we, you know, we talk about the importance of being data driven, but, like, that's a brilliant. I mean, it's a little creepy, don't get me wrong, but it's a. It's a brilliant. You didn't make it creepy. It's just creepy that it exists. But if it's going to exist, you might as well take a look at it. Yeah, that's great.

I mean, that's how. I mean, that's the same technology they can. They use for crime solving. Now, where the phone is.

Oh, yeah. Oh, the traffic, everything, you know, on the maps.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah.

You're really doing forensics, aren't you? On. On the location itself.

I mean, you don't know name or whatever. At least you know where the pings are. So.

No, you. Yeah, you don't know who these people are. But, but you're y. You know, where they've come from and, and how much they make in a general sense. And. Yeah, that's fascinating.

And then you can go to the United States Postal Service every, Every door, direct mail, and you can basically give you street by street, home by home, income level. So you get every subdivision, what income level is.

Yeah, that's great. That's terrific. So, okay, so I, I love all this. We're talking about your success and everything, but, you know, we're a little different here. We really like mistakes. Because maybe it. I've made so many.

Let me tell you, it's a struggle. It is a struggle. Every day it's been a challenge to make it profitable. So, of course, let me give you an example. Okay. So I try to stay ahead. So when we first launched our concept in 2011, I had actually introduced eight vegetarian items, way ahead of the vegan and vegetarian trend. Eleven years ago, as vegan became More and more popular. We offered a lot more. I have five tacos you can't get anywhere else. No. Beyond meat or whatever. Made with real ingredients, real vegetables on the menu. Okay. I did that to kind of offset the prices of the meat and everything else going up. And then comes the pandemic. And right after that, supply chain problems. So right now, we used to pay $15 for a box of eggs. Now the same box went to as high as $72. Last week it was 66 bucks. Okay.

Oh, my gosh.

The cheap combination I used to melt to make the queso. I paid 55 bucks for it. Now it's $94. It's across the board. It went crazy. So to show profit right now is virtually impossible unless I cut the portions, are lower the quality of the food, which don't want to. Because I survived 11 years doing the right thing. Why would I kill the concept right now? So right now, yeah, I'm operating my stores, making hardly any profit whatsoever for things to get better. Because if I go change stuff because I could get a good cook for $13. Now I have to pay $17 for a guy who can't even cook properly.

Right.

And then the turnover in the front of the house is extremely high because they come and they jump. These young kids leave from place to place in no time whatsoever. They don't have the same work ethic we grew up with. It's a totally different mindset. So with that, to make money now is virtually impossible.

So have you raised your. Have you had. Have you raised your prices at all?

Can you do that? But you can raise it enough? I mean, there's no way I could pass it out to my. My customers. So I've taken a couple of price increases, but that doesn't offset. So when you were paying $2.99 for chicken breast, and it goes to as high as 544, and it's slowly coming down now. I can't. I can't double a taco or double quesadilla. Yeah. So. So you just have to. As a good businessman, you got to come back and say, okay, hopefully, maybe there is something going to change. Hopefully there's going to be a recession. I mean, you. It's. You don't want a recession, but.

Yeah, I know what you mean, though.

Well, there needs to be a correction is what you're looking at.

Right. Right now, it's out of control. We lost, I think what happened. I mean, the labor, it's also shifted. Okay. We used to get the immigrant Workforce used to come and work in the kitchen, whatever, and a lot of them went to construction because construction was booming and they could make more money in construction. Okay. The normal American kids, they used to come and work in the restaurants. Whether or not now with they've gone to work for Target and whatever where they just walk around their phone and fill the orders and make 15 bucks an hour and get benefits. So there is no reason for them to come get abused in the restaurant.

Right?

Yeah.

So. So the whole thing changed and then a lot of people, when they got the fourteen hundred dollars every month and so on, those guys, the young people kind of moved back with the parents and that. So I mean, they all kind of are doing their social media companies and whatever because I mean, I'm on LinkedIn so I get at least four people trying to sell me social media every day.

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, it is interesting and I. It will be fascinating to see this shift and I think we will see. Maybe we're already starting to see it out here in California. I think we are in later into this year as, as we get maybe back to a. This, you know, market that.

Yeah.

Different values, I guess.

No, there's going to be a correction. I see all the big guys, they stopped building new restaurants. I stopped all my plants. I had three stores I was considering. I stopped it completely. I'm not going to touch anything until economy changes where you can actually hire people and the prices come down. There's no point opening one right now. You can't make any money.

Yeah, can't make any money. How about the. Talk about the. You have bars at your restaurant counter. Alcohol.

Yeah, we serve liquor in all our restaurants. Yes.

It's significant part of, I imagine, of profit generation.

Getting after Covid. Ah, so before COVID 70% of the customers ate in the dining room and 30 took it to go. Okay. During the COVID it was 70 to go and 30% of the dining room. Now that whole mindset has not completely changed. Right now, even though I have a bar and everything, 52% of our customers still take the food to go.

Wow.

With that said, my liquor sales in my, let's say in my good store, liquor sales used to be about 19% of sales. Now they're 11% of sales.

Yeah.

And the drink sales, the soft drink sales and iced tea sales, you know, they're done almost 30%. So when you take the two most profitable, which actually help you bring the food cost down, whereas everything else, the food and paper costs have been gone up incredibly. High. Along with the natural gas. I used to pay 400 bucks a store for natural gas. Now I pay almost 800 bucks. It's doubled.

Yeah, it's brutal.

It's kind of brutal right now. So anybody who thinks, oh, I'm going to open a restaurant, I'm going to be rich. No, it's not happening.

Yeah, well, it's just you've been around the restaurant industry for a long time and I know maybe this one is, you know, a different type of cycle, but these cycles must come and go right over.

No, this is worst I've ever seen.

Yeah, I would agree with you on that. But when, when costs, I mean, there must be times when or maybe there isn't. I don't know. I'm speculating.

No, we never had this kind of inflation. So I mean all the big guys I work for, you took two price increases every year. So first half you took maybe 3% on half the items. And then in December you came back into 3% again. So overall you, you compensate inflation taking about 3% for the whole year. Right now if the price have gone up by 15 or 16% for me, I can't take 51. So that's been the biggest challenge, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it sounds like a smart move to, you know, focus on getting in good people and, and kind of waiting for things to turn, to turn around but protecting your customer base and your, you know, the, the concept. Right. And the, and the quality.

I think that's, yeah, that's, this, that's essential. I mean I have seen a lot of these so called fast casual restaurants. You know, they came with the promise of great food. Eventually they came back and lowered the quality and they're being closing stores. You can't, customer is too smart. I think you have two sets of customers. They're value driven customers and they're going to go to places which offer value and there are people who are willing to pay a little bit more for good food, quality food and good portions. And those guys are not that many, but they'll support your brand.

Yeah, that's great. That makes sense. So, okay, so you're involved really hands on, especially right now with staffing issues. What's the best part of your day? Running, you know, running your business?

No, so I go to the stores and talk to customers. When customers tell me they drove 30 miles to come and eat the food at my restaurant, that makes me smile. Okay.

Yes, yes.

That's, that's fantastic. Congratulations. That's good. Yeah.

I mean, so I have Vegan customers who drive from 30, 40 miles to come eat the food because it's pure food. So we basically. I mean, if you go back and say what our whole approach is, you know, we serve food made from scratch with pure ingredients, boldly paired to create complex and inventive flavors. That's what we're all about.

Yeah.

And we can't deviate from that.

Yeah. So right now, things are kind of on hold. You're focused on protecting the brand and the concept. But after things come back, which I know they will, we're very optimistic on this show. You have to be to be interesting.

I'm very optimistic. Otherwise, why would I do this? I mean.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Other than farmers, who. I think farmers are crazy optimists. They have to be, too. Business owners are right up there. But once things turn around, it sounds like you want to continue to expand and. And grow your footprint and add more restaurants over time.

Yes, unquestionably, yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess I look at it like this. I work for large chains and sold for years food, which is not necessarily good for good for them. Now I have to pay back my dues by going to neighborhoods and making great food to make them healthy and happy.

I love that. That's a great outlook. So, Nani, thank you so much for coming on, sharing your story. It's inspiring and I've learned a lot. I have one more question before we wrap things up. And we've given a lot of advice to people. What would you give a young person, new entrepreneur, interested in getting into the food business? I. I have a sense I might know what you say right now based on the timing. But what. What piece of advice would you give somebody that's interested in starting a business like yours?

I would say success doesn't come very easily. You're first. You should really make sure that you have a defendable concept. Otherwise, 10 people copy you in no time. If you know the second, you have to know how to survive and during the toughest times and realize that a great concept is not built in one year, two years. When I go back and look at some of this, somebody's local restaurant chains which succeeded, they've been around for 20, 30 years. And those guys lived in one bedroom apartment for years and didn't drive fancy cars, whatever, till the end. Now they're driving, they're living their life, but that pain reduced for a long time.

Yeah, I love that. I think it's great. You got to put in the. Put in the effort that's terrific. You know, we'll put links in our, our show notes on the website to your locations. And again, thanks again, Monty. It's inspiring, and I think it's really important for other entrepreneurs to hear that, oh, I'm not the only one struggling. And we try to bring that to the show each day. And, um, again, appreciate your time today to learn about Taco with Joe.

Awesome. Just, just tell them with my experience with running so many stores, I'm struggling. So that means if some guy who did not have the same experience, he's struggling, he should not feel bad. This is the time. It's got a tough time right now.

Yeah, no, it's great advice. Thank you again. We really appreciate it.

Hey, thank you, guys. Thanks for doing this. You have a wonderful evening.

You too.

Bye. Bye.

Great stuff, man. I, you know, I, I, I miss these, this part of these interviews, and maybe that's me being selfish. Shannon. You know, I agree. I, I love hearing ideas from, from other people. Like, I mean, that's really what it is. His, that whole thing where he said, you got to go get yourself 20 to 30,000 customers for that type of business to do a million dollars a year, you know, in sales, it's like, wow, that's a lot of customers.

Yeah. And he, and using location, location forensics, as you mentioned, that's a, that's a great term where they're doing ping. He's buying the data from location information to see where the customers are coming from, where they go after. It is. It's amazing.

Makes me feel, and he also made me feel less bad about running with much thinner margins than I would like to, so. Yeah, well.

And commend. I really value the authenticity of explaining what a struggle it is in the restaurant business right now. And it's probably that way in many service industries and folks often don't like to talk about it. But, you know, he's, he's just a great guy. One of the things I, I really enjoyed hearing him talk about was getting the best part of his day was getting closer to the customer versus working for a big corporation. And, and that's what seems to really drive him, that, that engagement that he gets. And I love that because that is often the best part about it. You know, most people are, most people are pretty cool, and if you offer a great service, they want to tell you about it. And I really appreciated having Monty on the show today and learning about Paco Ocho.

Yeah. Great stuff. Thanks for coming on, Monty. Thanks for listening, everybody. Again, feedback at businessbrain show. If you have have thoughts about this, if you think we should have done this as two episodes and chopped it up, let us know that too. We really do want to do it. Until next week. Keep living that charmed life.